Chastened banks cuts tens of thousands of jobs

— SLIMMING DOWN: Switzerland’s UBS has been cutting jobs and saying it wants to create a simpler bank, which includes getting rid of “excess management layers.” In investment banking, it has shaken up the top ranks and exited businesses “that have been rendered uneconomical by changes in regulation and market developments.”

— UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT: In December, less than two months after Corbat took over as CEO, Citigroup announced it would cut 11,000 jobs, or about 4 percent of its total. The bulk comes from consumer banking, but the investment bank and operations and technology have also been hit. Corbat likes to say that the bank will be a “maniacal allocator of resources.”

— MORTGAGES IMPROVING: As mortgage losses stabilize, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have slashed the units that service troubled home loans.

— REPLACING TELLERS: Most big banks are cutting branches because they’re expensive to maintain and customers don’t visit as often. For the branches that remain, new technology is making human tellers less necessary, with machines counting cash and ATMs dispensing exact change. JPMorgan, Netherlands-based ING and others are cutting positions in their branches as customers get increasingly comfortable banking online or by smartphone.

If there’s no pattern to the job cuts, they are knitted together by a common theme of the industry’s shifting landscape.

Antony Jenkins, appointed CEO of Barclays last year after the bank’s interest rate-fixing scandal, in February laid out a turnaround plan that included exiting risky businesses, cutting jobs and slashing the proportion of revenue that the bank spends on salaries and bonuses.